Fred Cook is as much a Long Beach icon, as is the wooden beach arch that defines the long sandy beach and city that Harry Tinker plotted in the second half of the 19th century.

Like Tinker, Cook has vision, generosity, and commitment to community. When asked why he chose the community course, Cook thinks steadily then answers. He is not one to field a legitimate question lightly. “I would rather be involved in the process of community management than chipping away – from the outside – at those people who are involved in the decision making.” There is nothing hypocritical about the man. Cook believes in being active.

Cook’s beginnings were humble. Born to Fred and Hazel Cook in 1942, he started trolling for salmon on the 41-foot Albacore when he was 9 years old. Fishing out of Westport, Wash., he was paid 1 cent each for every salmon he washed down and iced after his father pulled the salmon onto the deck of his sea troller. Cook began hunting waterfowl with his brother Frank before his teens, though he admits missing a lot of the time, at least in the beginning. “Near sighted,” he claims, touching the frames of his gold-rimmed glasses.

The family lived briefly in Bay Center, Wash., but soon gravitated to the Long Beach Peninsula. Months later, they were living in McGowan, in a cold single-frame home just upriver from Chinook. Cook remembers gathering tree bark daily on the Columbia River shore, and “eating lots of razor clams, under-sized salmon and oatmeal.” At night he slept under a pile of blankets to cut a pernicious wind that chiseled through the thin-walled, single-room cabin. From the beginning, he had challenges with a tempestuous father, and, to make matters worse, he was frequently hungry.

Cook was popular in high school, a revelation that surprised the student himself, a teenager both shorter and lighter than many of his classmates. He excelled in glee club, literally finding his voice. “Wonderful,” he states today, looking from his turn-of-the-century home out over the yellow dune grasses, westerly toward the Pacific Ocean. “The thing for me was that I escaped from home, from a difficult relationship with my father.”

In his junior and senior years, Cook played football, not excelling, but simply holding his own. Today he describes how that commitment gave him more self-esteem and confidence than in any other moment of his young life. “This was my first awareness that I could compete in any area.” Meanwhile – at 16 – he moved out of his family home, breaking his mother’s heart. Cook felt the move was essential to his well-being. That summer, he bunked with a friend and worked three jobs until realizing that “some sleep was essential.” Nevertheless, he stayed committed to two of the three jobs. Like mother, like son.

His mother Hazel ran the Ocean View Grill, a woman with one arm crippled by polio when Cook was 3. She was famous for her pies, determination and a particular brand of kindness. “Mom always tried to make up for dad, but that didn’t help a lot.” His father lost the Albacore and began to blame others for his personnel mistakes. Young Fred regarded the behavior closely and decided early on, never to fall into the same trap.

That fall, when his roommate left for school and gave up the apartment, another friend, Butch Ambrose, told Cook’s story to his mother. He brought Cook to the family motel. “Blanca Ambrose was cleaning rooms at their family business, the Arcadia Court. Blanca didn’t seem to be listening as she did her work, but after a few minutes, she turned to me and said, ‘Your room will be the first room to the right at the top of the stairs.'”

That evening when Fred sat at the family table for the first time, Blanca’s husband Mel regarded the new arrival and blurted out, “What the hell is this mother, another orphan to feed?” Today, Cook smiles, “That was Mel’s way of saying hello.” If that introduction seemed brusque, the relationship blossomed anyway. When Mel died years later and Blanca suggested to her children, Susan and Butch that they split up the will between the two of them, both protested. “What about Fred?” One third, they insisted, should go to their surrogate brother.

In 1961, and 180 miles from his life in Long Beach, Cook accepted a blind double date with friends and a woman who would become his wife. At the time he was working for Northwest Bell in Seattle. Cook’s date was Patty Bailey, a woman with the same kind of grit he had sampled with the Ambrose family. Arriving at the door with the other couple, Alice Sund (Patty’s friend and his buddy’s date) smiled and said to Patty, “guess which one is yours?” “Patty looked first at my buddy who was much taller and more handsome, and then turned to me. She chose to stay mute, and I fell for her right then.”

The couple has been married 42 years.

Patty’s father, Ray Bailey, was an optician who ran his small business out of the basement beneath his house. After Patty and Fred married in 1962, he suggested that Fred go to school at Seattle Central Community College and become certified as an optician. Three years later Cook and his father-in-law opened their first shop just north of the University of Washington. Cook ended up with four stores, raised two children, Crystal and Michael, and built up a comfortable, but modest, retirement. The Cooks bought a home on the ocean ridge (Boulevard) in Long Beach in 1988. Cook quickly jumped into community politics as a board member of the local chamber of commerce, and later as a councilman on the Long Beach City Council.

What is most remarkable about the adventures of this silver-haired man is that unexplained element called chance. “We go through many junctures in life. My value system wasn’t always perfect, but when I needed help, somebody always stepped forward. Somebody was put in place.” Cook shrugs when attempting to define his sense of spirituality. “If I have a gift, it’s that I’m sensitive to my situation. Call that, an ability realized.”

Meanwhile Cook professes a vision for Long Beach. He talks about the changes he would like to implement within that city, but seems resolved to the fact that changes never come easily or – for that matter – quickly. “My job, he states, “is to protect my community.” His friend and past councilman Gary Luethe calls Cook, “Helpful Hanna,” and smiles broadly at the teasing. Few could deny Cook’s amicability.

A few years ago, Cook was elected president of the Optical Association of Washington. “After the first six months, I realized that I wasn’t elected to make everyone happy. I was elected to do a job. My job was to lead.”

All the while he lives happily with Patty and his three-legged yellow lab, Barney, who lost a leg in an car collision when just a pup. Cook talks about luck, crossroads and about that long winding road we call life’s journey.

“Personally,” says Cook, “I feel blessed, more blessed than lucky.”